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In a talk at the Brighton, UK-based Develop conference, Fable III audio associate producer Georg Backer has said the upcoming Lionhead action role-playing game will contain more than 47 hours of recorded speech, compared to Fable II's 36 hours.

Expect everyone to be a lot more talkative in Fable III.

Backer talked up the quantity of dialogue given to the large population of Fable III's simulated world, made up of "30 or 40" types of AI character. "Apart from the story, quests and combat mechanics, we have a really great AI system. Our AI is the biggest chunk of our dialogue," he said.

These 47 hours of speech include "gossip lines," in which "the AI talk to you and each other about what's happening in the game, [which] you hear in passing and might tell you what you can go and do," as well as "over 1,500 marriage lines." Each AI character, said Backer, is "about 2,000 lines" and the variety of dialogue options for non-player characters in the gameworld is intended so the player "doesn't hear the same sentence three or four times in a row."

It took three writers to write the 460,000 or so recorded words in the game, said Backer, and more than 80 actors to play all the characters, including the "six or seven main characters". In a couple of video clips, Backer showed off Fable III's "GUI (graphical user interface) room," called the Sanctuary, which is an in-game room containing a world map model with a travelling mechanism. In the video, a female hero character was introduced to the room alongside support characters Sir Walter and butler Jasper, voiced by John Cleese.

"We tried to get rid of the 2D GUI because it's detached from the actual experience," said Backer. "Hence the idea of the Sanctuary, where you can go in and change weapons and clothes...You can pop in and out instantly...It's part of the story."